According to CoinDesk, NEAR Protocol has implemented a significant upgrade called 'Nightshade 2.0' on its main network, aimed at enhancing the blockchain's scalability and usability. The new features include 'stateless validation,' a concept extensively discussed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, as per a press release from the NEAR Foundation, which supports the blockchain.
Despite being ranked as the 25th largest blockchain by DeFILlama, NEAR is closely monitored in crypto tech circles, partly due to the credentials of its founder, Illia Polosukhin, a former top engineer at Google specializing in AI systems. The upgrade is part of NEAR's strategy to integrate 'sharding' into its core design. Sharding involves splitting the blockchain into smaller pieces to scale the network, allowing it to process more transactions at a lower cost. Ethereum has a similar roadmap for achieving full sharding and recently implemented proto-danksharding, the first iteration of this concept.
The press release states, 'NEAR validators no longer have to maintain the state of a shard locally and can retrieve all the information they need to validate state changes, or 'state witnesses,' from the network. This both improves single-shard performance and adds capacity for more shards on the network.' Nightshade has been part of NEAR's roadmap for years, with the first version introduced in 2022. NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin published a white paper on the original Nightshade in 2019.
Bowen Wang, the head of protocol at NEAR, stated in the press release, 'Nightshade 2.0 is a fundamental reworking of NEAR sharding and is a major milestone in NEAR’s development roadmap that will greatly increase NEAR’s efficiency and scalability. The new sharding implementation will speed up NEAR’s already-fast transaction throughput by five times. It also substantially lowers the cost of operating validators, lowering the barrier to entry for more people to become validators, which will improve the decentralization of the network.'
